If you stick with us, we are about to show you some useful advertising tips that you can start implementing right away. And guess what: the ones we will cover here today are free, and if not completely free, then budget-friendly. 

Let’s start with the tools you can use to advertise your business.

Cost-free Tools

In a nutshell, the common denominator for the majority of cost-free tools is content. You’ve probably heard the expression: “ Content is the king”. Good content is an absolute necessity. Why? Well, it helps you stand out among your competitors and it emphasizes your value proposition even more. Also, it makes you more visible.

Engage on Social Media

Speaking of free advertising, what better than social media. The major mistake people make is that they don’t engage with their audience or with other potential partners or influencers. Speak up, share your opinion on relevant matters and draw attention when starting a company. 

Promote your blogs, follow other influential people, take part in online conferences, and create polls. Regularly posting quality content, content that your audience will benefit from, is one of the best advertising strategies you can do. And it’s free. In reality, you can hardly make a mistake here. The only mistake you can make is being dormant and just lingering on social media without providing value for your business.

Email Campaigns

Although some people may complain that there are too many emails nowadays, the fact remains that most business communications come from emails themselves. With the help of email automation tools (many of them, like AWeber offer automation in their free plans), you can really keep your clients engaged by creating welcome emails, thank you emails, email newsletters. You just schedule them according to your business priorities and they pretty much do the work for you. They are a great time saver.

Blogging

The power of words, be it spoken or written is undeniable. It’s the strongest “weapon” because it hits directly into the heart. What better way to advertise starting a company than to write blogs? Use your expertise and make a blog easy to read. Make it entertaining while shedding some light on the hottest topics from your industry. 

Blogs are a great way to show your knowledge, engage with your audience and also do some networking. You can present your business, show what sets you apart from your competitors and where your value lies. There are educational platforms for entrepreneurs that post blogs and other educational material. These platforms could be a great place to share your wisdom and attract new customers or build powerful business relationships. 

Word-of-Mouth Advertising

It goes without saying that we live in a digital age, but word-of-mouth advertising should definitely not be underestimated. Why? The answer is very simple: people buy from companies they trust. You know yourself that trust is one of the most difficult things to build because it takes lots of time and patience. 

However, with word-of-mouth advertising that process goes much faster. Your loyal customers will spread the word to their friends, families, and colleagues. Those people would be more inclined to buy from you because someone they trust recommended you. You don’t need to go through hoops to earn their trust. 

You already got yourself a nice foundation on which you can continue to build your business relations. And although it isn’t directly linked to advertising, don’t forget to reward your loyal customers. Show them how much you appreciate them.

Partnership and Branding

When you are a small business, partnering with other respectable brands can make you more visible and attract more leads. At the same time, don’t forget about your own brand. Your brand is your ambassador. Thus, it needs to be in line with your business mission and value proposition. The key is consistency so that people can start connecting the brand with you. Consistency in this case equals trust and a sense of security. 

Moreover, it makes your business more memorable. In order to achieve consistency, make sure to use the same “voice,” the same visual branding across all social media channels. Emphasize your (key) value proposition so that the next time somebody sees your logo, for example, they immediately recognize it and know what to expect.

Internal Communication

All the advertising tools that we presented in the lines above are there to help you grow your business and connect more with your target audience. However, you should bear in mind that all these tools can’t compensate for the lack of internal communication in your company/team. It is essential that you nurture this type of communication in order to really create a high-quality working environment. 

This environment will further impact the work processes, and ultimately, the way you deliver your product. To think that the relations within the company/team don’t affect the relations with your customers would be a huge mistake. 

The statistics clearly show how important this aspect is and how often we neglect it. If you are unsure where to start from, check these internal communication examples from companies like Amazon, Netflix, Starbucks, etc. You can also check the statistics while you are at it. It will give you a great(er) insight into the importance of internal communication.

Try implementing some of these advertising tips for small businesses. They can set you apart from the competition without blowing your budget or your time.

The post Starting a Company: Tools for Advertising and Communication appeared first on SmallBizTechnology.

Currently, this marketing method is shaded by social media dominance. The capability of this type of marketing campaign is often ignored by marketers. Of course, social media can boost your marketing strategies and give the results you wanted. However, marketing via email can produce instant results for your business in comparison to the social networks.

Want to know how? Check out these eight reasons why marketing through email is better than social media:

1. Personalization for improved outcomes

Email messages can be personalized more than a social media post. They allow you to easily segment audiences and send them personalized messages with more specific outcomes with CTAs.

2. Segments messages to boost conversions

You can easily slice and dice your mailing list per your strategic actions based on their prior actions. Details about the emails open and links they click let you use that behavior in segmenting the audience further. This should lead to better conversion rates.

On the other hand, social media will only give you some control in demographic targeting. It’s also troublesome to track at the individual level. Even though some social media channels allow demographic segmentation, none will work like email marketing.

3. Email builds relationships and credibility

People wish to do business with those they know, admire and trust. Email offers a direct connection to the customer, making it more personal rather than social media marketing. Customers can also quickly connect with you in case of questions or concerns via email.

Also, the personal appreciation messages you send will strengthen customer relationships and open the doorways for more future business.

4. Customers favor email for promotional messages

You can send promotional offers via email based on customers’ shopping patterns with this type of marketing. Rather than just sending a generalized promotional offer, you can embrace that opportunity to send special offers for the products and services customers are interested in. Besides, you can run a permission-based promotional campaign to improve sales and keep the customers attracted to your business.

5. Email reaches more mobile consumers

Undoubtedly, the number of smartphone users increases daily. Many of them check and respond to email on their phone. Unlike building an app or SMS marketing, email marketing does not require small businesses to invest a significant amount in new technology or various software.

6. Email is more cost-efficient

Email is an inexpensive way to reach people interested in hearing from you and regularly communicate with them. Plus, whether you want to run a marketing campaign or send promotional offers, it’s relatively cheaper than advertising on social media platforms. If you can get better results at an affordable price with email, why would you spend more?

7. Seamless integration with other marketing tactics

Another top advantage of marketing through email for small businesses is that it blends well with other marketing tools. Companies can craft emails to reach a variety of goals and promote a number of other campaigns.

For instance, you can combine email marketing with a CRM system. If you are running a precise campaign and want to measure analytics, marketing through email works. On the contrary, you have to be dependent on the network you choose for social media and the facility they provide.

8. Own your email list

With your own email list, you have a direct route to potential customers and interact with them. Also, everything you communicate with them is under your control, unlike other platforms. More specifically, you need to make communications with the target audience as per the social media network’s rules, regulations, and features they provide.

Reasons to make email part of your marketing strategy include:

• Email efficiently drives more traffic to your company website

• Email helps in generating higher ROI

• It can be an effective tool to generate brand awareness

• Emails improve customers’ engagement easily and quickly

• Marketing via email is useful for testing the various strategies

If you make email part of your marketing strategy, you will have a lot more benefits than choosing social media. The most common advantages of marketing through email include owning an email list, most personalized and one-to-one communication, inexpensive, audience segmentation, and much more.

Whether to choose marketing through social media or email, it should be your decision. Nonetheless, when you want to increase brand awareness, boost sales, or retain brand-loyal customers, the power of marketing through email should not be overlooked.

The post 8 Reasons Why Email Marketing Is Better Than Social Media appeared first on SmallBizTechnology.

These answers are provided by Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. YEC has also launched BusinessCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.

1. Don’t Always Use Your Name

Did you know that you can change the “sent from” field in your emails? For example, if your audience loves Jim Carrey references, you could change your name in the “sent from” field to “ALLLLLL” and then the subject line to “Righty Then.” Then the first sentence of your email can be about your product closing down in four hours. This tactic has increased our open rates and click-through rates. – Bryan Kesler, CPA Exam Guide

2. A/B Test Subject Lines

With a lot of the email marketing automation software out there, you are able to A/B test subject lines. When sending out an email, send half with one subject line and use a different subject line for the next. It could be as simple as including emojis in one, and not using emojis in the other. See which subject line had the higher open rate, and adjust your email marketing accordingly. – Jayna Cooke, EVENTup

3. Engage and Ask for Responses

Email marketing shouldn’t be a one-way, transactional interaction where the sender blindly emails thousands of people without the ability to hear from their audience. Make your emails engaging and ask your readers to reply to you. Give surveys and be friendly. Emails should be from the CEO and should build a relationship with readers. This helps build a community of people who open your email! – Matt Wilson, Under30Experiences

4. Use Questions in the Subject Line

Give them a question and they are more likely to open the email, as they realize you are asking because you want to share your answer with them. If it relates to an identified problem that target audience is having, they are even more likely to open it. – Serenity Gibbons, Calendar.com

5. Have a Catchy Headline

You need to have a catchy headline that engages your audience. Simply putting in information about your company, yourself and your services is not interesting. Figure out what your clients want to learn about, and write about that in an interesting way. – Peter Boyd, PaperStreet Web Design

6. Remove Spammy Keywords

Since people’s inboxes can get flooded with emails everyday, it’s never easy filtering out the good and bad emails. Sometimes you’ll receive an email that gets pushed into the spam folder when it shouldn’t. To avoid this, try to remove specific keywords in the email content that are normally associated with spam. Phrases such as “act now,” “cash bonus” or “earn more money” should get removed. – Solomon Thimothy, OneIMS

7. Optimize Subject Lines for Mobile

Most emails are now being opened on mobile devices so it’s important to optimize the subject line with that in mind. Keep your email subject lines brief. We’ve found that what works best for us is keeping our subject lines at six-ten words or 25 characters. You can also use free tools to see what your subject line will look like on mobile before you hit “send.” – Jared Atchison, WPForms

8. Be Less Formal

I’m seeing a trend of more emojis showing up in the subject line. Sometimes going less formal with your message is just the trick to get across the combination of urgency and personal touch needed to get the harried subscriber to open your email. – Tim Chaves, ZipBooks Accounting Software

9. Just Send It Again

After sending an email, wait a week, then resend it to the people who haven’t opened it. If you’re building your list the right way, a simple resend is a great way to make sure people aren’t just missing your email in their crowded inbox. Warning: You’ll probably get slightly more unsubscribers doing this, but the additional opens will outweigh the unsubscribes. – Francois de Lame, Policygenius Inc.

10. Don’t Overdo It

If you fill up a customer’s inbox with emails, you will soon find yourself in the spam folder. Save your emails for when it really matters. If your customer trusts that you aren’t going to waste their time with nonsense, they will be more prone to read what you have to say. – Adrien Schmidt, OpenBouquet

11. Consider the Time of Day

Take into consideration what time of day your audience is most likely to be looking through their email and be interested in a newsletter for reading. They just got to work? Probably not the best time. Waiting in line to pick up the kids from school? Prime time for opens. – Kevin Conner, BroadbandSearch

12. Be Authentic

I try to avoid hacky tricks but instead tailor my message to my recipient. If you do a little work up front and do some research on the prospect — or even just include one sentence specific to only them when using automated email software — you can see open rates north of 20% (check out LinkedIn for easy, yet specific, info on recipients). – Michael Averto, ChannelApe

13. Tell a Story

Out of all the spam that gets sent to my inbox, the messages that I am most likely to read are long-form anecdotes. These remind me of op-eds I would read on news sites. Writing something that looks like a decent amount of thought was put in it will add value in the eyes of recipients. This will increase the likelihood that they not only open your email, but read it too. – Bryce Welker, CPA Exam Guy

The post 13 Ways to Increase Your Email Open Rates — and Engagement appeared first on SmallBizTechnology.

If you’re like most, you probably said something along the lines of building an effective and well-maintained email list. And it’s true – an email list can easily become your best friend when it comes to conversions.

It’s an avenue that allows frequent and direct communication to keep you top of mind and it can be one of the best ways to direct traffic to new content. In fact, email automation platform Campaign Monitor conducted an annual report for 2016 that shows for every dollar spent on email marketing, you’ll typically earn back $44. That’s some impressive ROI!

But that kind of return is only possible if you’re using your email list wisely. The five tactics outlined below will help you not only grow your email list, but also turn it into a customer converting machine.

1. Strategically Located Opt-Ins

An email list without opt-in forms is like a flower without roots – it won’t last long and it makes you wonder how it came to be in the first place. But it’s where you place these opt-ins that really drives conversions.

In classic newspaper form, above the fold placement on your page is essential. It’s all about being able to spot the opt-in quickly and easily. Draw the eye with some colors and make it especially visually appealing to bring in more subscribers and grow your list a breakneck pace.

2. Take Advantage of Lightbox Popups

The sight of an opt-in may be enough to scare off some prospective leads. That’s why you should also incorporate a different tactic – lightboxes. Think of these as mobile opt-in forms, ones that are activated once a prospect reads a certain post or scrolls through your page enough.

Technically considered popups (which if you’re completely opposed to then checkout tip #5), these nifty features have a clear call to action, catch the eye, and trigger strategically, among their many other benefits.

3. Split Test Like Crazy

This should be a major priority already but just in case it isn’t, split testing is absolutely essential in the marketing game. Color psychology, word connotation, length, and structure all come into play when someone decides whether or not to engage with content.

Thankfully, most email platforms have this capability built right in. Beyond that, there are a host of other software options out there to help you along the way. Happy testing!

4. Encourage Forwarding

Depending on the platform you use, asking your users to forward your emails along to others can be a great way to grow your list without having to put in nearly any time at all.

You’ve heard of the power of asking followers to retweet on Twitter (which can boost these numbers by 23x)? Well the same principle applies to email.

But be sure to check the terms and conditions of your platform first as some may outlaw this technique specifically.

And as with almost any other marketing tactic, be sure to keep the pushiness down to a reasonable level.

5. Forget About Popups

Popups may be the go-to for a lot of marketers these days but for others, they’re the bane of their existence. And while the efficacy of such tactics can certainly be backed up by some impressive numbers, some people are moving away from popups entirely.

Luckily, though, there are a number of other ways you can still drive growth for your email lists without the help of these intrusive ads.

The Best Ways to Grow Your Email Lists

Emails are by far one of the most effective methods for making a connection, staying top of mind, and ushering prospects through your expertly crafted sales funnel. In fact, many marketers turn to email campaigns as their primary source of new customers.

And when you use the tactics above, you can be sure that your list will grow faster than ever!

The post 5 Ways to Grow an Email List that Actually Converts appeared first on SmallBizTechnology.

And if I’m guessing right, most of the write-ups you’ve read are generic — borderline useless — that you can’t even imagine why anyone would take the time to write such a piece.

Don’t worry; this article isn’t one of those.

If you’re sick and tired of reading pointless articles about B2B marketing disguised as “must-read guides,” then you’re in the right place.

B2B Marketing professionals from Novus are going to share with you a 3-step marketing strategy that you can use to grow your customer base. If you take the time to implement/use the steps detailed in this guide, I promise you’ll get positive results out of your marketing endeavors one way or the other.

Let’s hop right in.

Step 1: Scrape data from directory sites to get leads.

The YellowPages is the next best thing since sliced bread for business owners and marketers who are looking for clients in a B2B setting.

Not only does the website have bazillions of people visiting them on a monthly basis (Similarweb says they have about 40.50 million unique monthly visitors), but the platform also houses truckloads of businesses in their database.

Don’t believe me?

Allow me to show you a glimpse of what the platform has to offer.

For the sake of example, I’ll look for  a Marketing Agency to help grow your business in Los Angeles, CA.

I see 3000+ businesses listed.

While I doubt that all of the business listed are real (some of them are probably closed already), I’m sure you’ll agree that a good bit of the businesses listed here are still alive and kicking.

That being said, if you’ll go to YP to scrape the website and contact information of your target business, then you’d be able to come up with a list of people to target real fast.

Once you have the list ready, you can start sending outreach messages to the business owners. Depending on your take on what B2B selling is all about, this might or might not be a good tactic for you to try. If you’re more comfortable with pure inbound marketing, as opposed to inbound mixed with outbound, then scraping the YellowPages and then reaching out cold is probably not a good fit for you.

Just remember, there is more to scraping data from the internet than just using it to come up with a list of people to reach out to. The benefits of web scraping are far overreaching. Not only can you use web scraping to find leads, but you can also use it to study your competitors’ marketing strategies, get better insights on how your target audience are reacting to offers, or extract data from websites.

At this point, you should already have a list of businesses whom you can reach out to. However, before you do just that, I urge you to do step number two first.

Step 2: Use Twitter to establish your personal brand.

Having an established brand is important before reaching out to others — especially to business owners. With all the spammers on the internet, almost everyone tends to be wary of who’s reaching out to them. If they do their research and see that the person who reached out to them doesn’t have a strong enough clout, then it’d be easier for them to dismiss the person as a spammer, therefore, ignoring the person.

Of course, you do not want to be ignored by the business owners whom you’ll reach out to.

After all, what good will the list that you’ve put together in step number one be if none of them will reply to your outreach message, right?

Well, it’s a good thing there’s Twitter.

Establishing your brand through Twitter is fairly simple to pull off since there are Twitter automation tools that you can use to increase your Twitter following. There are a couple of nifty things that these automation tools can do for you. Narrow.io’s features allow you to follow/unfollow people automatically, and also “Likes” other people’s posts if their posts have the keywords that you added in your account settings.

With these two features alone, you’d be able to grow your Twitter followers (therefore establishing your brand, to some extent), without you having to spend countless hours on Twitter. You just need to set the Twitter automation tool one-time, and you’re pretty much ready to go.

Step 3: Start your outreach.

At this point, you should already have two very crucial ingredients to your client acquisition endeavor: 1) A list of prospects that you can reach out to, and 2) An established enough brand as evidenced by your Twitter profile having thousands of followers. Now that you have these two points readied, it’s time for you to start reaching out to your list of prospects.

There are several angles you take when reaching out to your leads. You can either offer them freebies to get them to open up to you, you can straight up pitch your services on your first email (rarely should you do this), or you can contact them offering to collaborate with them on a project of some sort (among other things).

Because there’s no way I can predict which approach you’ll take, allow me to share with you some guidelines that you need to consider when creating your outreach messages.

These are some of the crucial points that you need to consider to get better conversion rates.

1. Talk about how the recipients can benefit from you, and not on how awesome you are.
2. Keep your message as concise as possible.
3. Make sure that your message have these elements: a) How they can benefit from you, b) A short statement telling why they can trust you, and c) A clear statement telling them what exactly it is that you want them to do. When you have these points in your message, your chances of getting a reply drastically increases.

Whether you’re pitching a guest post, straight-up selling your services, or you’re trying to build a strategic partnership with your prospects; you’ll get better results out of your outreach methods with the points above.

The post This 3-Step B2B Marketing Plan Can Bring You More Sales appeared first on SmallBizTechnology.

During the slow times, it makes a world of difference to have an established system in place for generating new leads and pushing them into and through your sales funnel.

This is obviously much easier said than done.

Inbound marketing efforts are not always effective. The leads you do have go cold. And even more often, people are just downright uninterested.

If this is the situation your brand is currently facing, fret not for you can refill your marketing funnel with just a few steps and a little bit of guidance.

1. Land in the Right Inboxes

When your sales funnel is barren, there are a variety of ways to drum up leads. You can ask current customers for referrals, attend networking events and collect business cards, write informative articles in publications your desired audience gravitates towards, and so on.

There is a good chance, however, that even these tactics will fall short and you will have to mine for prospects using search engines and platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other social destinations.

The key to this method is selecting an industry or demographic that has proven particularly fruitful in the past and targeting these individuals.

Create a spreadsheet for this folks and organize them by their likelihood to be interested in your offerings.

Before reaching out, however, it is necessary to ensure you have the correct and appropriate email address. Since people have, on average, 1.7 email accounts, your best bet at catching their attention is using a corporate address; this, unfortunately, is not always easy to find.

In such situations, it is wise to deploy an automatic email finding tool.

This type of service will save you tons of man hours hunting down the correct address and can ensure you are getting in front of your audience.

Once you have the right contact information for your leads, it’s time to start the outreach process.

2. Start Cold Emailing

There are a lot of businesses and entrepreneurs that shy away from cold emailing tactics and largely consider these types of communications to be spam; this is nonsense as cold emails are still a widely used technique in various fields and are (more importantly) still quite effective.

You do, however, need to know how to appropriately construct your message and grab their attention. Anything that is are extraneous in any sort of way will get glossed over and eventually canned.

Start by ditching the introduction. Forget telling people about who you are or what your company does. Honestly, at this point, they don’t care.

Get right to the meat of your pitch by pointing out your prospect’s potential pain point and how you can solve it.

Additionally, considering that there are 205 billion emails sent every day, cold emails have a tremendous tendency to get lost in the mix.

This means that you need to continuously follow-up to verify they have seen your message. If this sounds time consuming, that’s because it is.

A more efficient technique involves leveraging a cold email outreach service like Mailshake which allows you to schedule various follow ups at custom intervals.

These types of services are not only an incredible resource for helping to maximize your funnel filling potential, but they often provide other beneficial tools for brands to utilize such as templates, analytics, and other insightful features.

Using this method, you are far more likely to gain the attention of a prospect than by simply sending a solitary email and crossing your fingers that they respond.

3. Know How to Follow-Up Effectively

You’ve manage to hook your lead and gain their interest; fantastic!

Now you need to close the deal.

Sending your prospect a business proposal is one of the best and most effective ways to showcase your company’s skillset and its ability to generate results.

Again, easier said than done.

Starting your proposal off on the right note and organizing the material in a convincing and appealing way is no small feat. Your copy needs to be insanely compelling. Additionally, company data like objectives, strategy proposal, campaign breakdowns, pricing packages, and more all need to be featured in an appealing and professional manner.

If this is something that you struggle with, you might want to consider setting your frustrations aside and utilize a powerful proposal software like PandaDoc that eliminates many of these pain points.

Any proposal software worthy of your time and money should be dynamic in its ability to create, send, and sign documents while also providing useful resources like templates, analytics features, and information archives that allow users to become increasingly effective at writing organized proposals.

Cold emails can often feel like a shot in the dark; especially when your company’s sales funnel is running on empty. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

There are extremely viable options for vetting out cold contacts, making sure they get in front of the right eyeballs at the right time and with the right message in order to move them into your sales funnel and get them to convert.

If your brand needs a refill on prospects, this is proven method to welcoming new and loyal prospects into your all-important sales funnels.

The post Filling the Funnel: 3 Steps to Turning Cold Leads into Hot Prospects appeared first on SmallBizTechnology.

Social media automation comes at a cost, even if you stick with basic software. Is it worth it?

Email automation comes with a monthly cost; does it earn enough to justify the cost?

Where should your marketing dollars go? Is email dead as a dodo? The crowd says social media, and especially Facebook, but have you checked for yourself?

Marketing decisions are always about choosing the most efficient channels for conversion into customers. When you look at your typical customer profile, the decision may appear obvious; Facebook if your customer profile is less than 30, and email if he is over 30. But is that an over-simplification?

Comparing Reach

Facebook follower numbers are high, but that means nothing because communicating with them is nigh on impossible. Facebook’s filtering mechanisms. Brian Boland from Facebook in the UK wrote about why organic reach is headed for zero.

Sharing helps to increase your reach and to put your brand in front of new faces, but the increase is from such a small base that it is always going to be a low number.

It takes more effort to acquire email subscribers, but every subscriber will see your email, though it might be in the promotions tab.

The Facebook Process

Someone is interested in you and clicks a link to follow your Facebook Page. You hope they will see some of your content in their feeds.

In reality, your organic reach to Facebook followers is very low for two reasons:

• Facebook limits organic reach because they want you to pay for ads
• There are so many possible items that can be shown in users’ feeds

If someone follows you, even then they don’t see your page in their feed.

Your page is hidden away behind the Pages link as highlighted above. Only if the individual shrinks the page or scrolls down will he or she see more than the top few pages they have followed.

The chance of one of your followers going through this process to see what is happening in your business is effectively zero.

The Email Process

Someone has to go to a bit more trouble to sign up to your email list.

You can make your signup page attractive and outline all the benefits people will get by clicking that button.

A subscriber needs to go to a bit of trouble to sign up, but there is nothing unexpected, and it just means a few clicks if he is using an autofill app.

You can then direct the subscriber to any page you choose. You have his attention, so use it to good effect.

From here on the subscriber sees every message you send. Yes, you need to work hard to make them interesting enough that they are worth opening, but the same can be said for a Facebook Page post. At least with email, you know people will see your marketing messages.

Advantage Gmail

Email has one other advantage. If you are using a gmail account you can personalize your signature. You can do this using the Settings link in your account, but the email signature you get is boring and does nothing for your marketing.

What would you give to have an email signature like one of the above? WiseStamp is a gmail signature app that will let you design the email signoff of your dreams.

Facebook Automation vs. Email Automation

Facebook automation possibilities are limited. Yes, you can use Hootsuite to upload a series of posts, but remember only 7% of your followers will see your post unless you pay to promote it.

Personalization is not possible with Facebook posts, further limiting their conversion rate.

Email automation possibilities are endless. The smart autoresponder from GetResponse allows you to build multiple lists and to divide each list into segments so you can target particular groups more easily.

You can also send unlimited personalized emails and develop automated workflows you can use time and again.

Check out this SmallBiz Technology post for further advice on choosing a marketing automation provider.

Your Takeaway

Customer acquisition is a combination of reach and engagement. One without the other is worthless. If your message reaches one million people, but no-one clicks on the link, then all that reach was wasted. Facebook has too many distractions to be an effective final stage marketing vehicle. Its best use is to persuade Facebook users to subscribe to your email list.

Build your email list, and use an autoresponder to send multiple messages to your subscribers. Be open and be yourself because people buy from people they trust. Emails and the blog posts they link to are excellent tools in the trust-building process that must precede any sale.

The post Battle of the Giants – Facebook vs. Email appeared first on SmallBizTechnology.

By the end of 2019, the number of worldwide email users will increase to over 2.9 billion. Over one third of the worldwide population will be using email by year end 2019”.

As for marketing emails…44% of people make purchases because of a promotional email.

So there you have the stats. Email is very much alive and well, and nowadays is the preferred method of communication across the world.

Although email signatures have been around from the stone ages or so it seems, they now have the potential to not only be a digital calling card, but a powerful and ideal marketing tool, because call to actions can be included in a way that is not pushy or salesy. Now the email signature can tell a story without you needing to.

In this article, find seven sneaky and subtle ideas to prompt action from email recipients.

#1 Create pro email signatures

Instantly add trust and credibility to your brand by creating a super professional email signature.

To do this easily, use Wisestamp. It works with just about all email service providers.

Once created, simply plug the HTML provided into your email settings, and Bob’s your uncle. Because of how easy this tool is to use, it would be a good idea to take the next six ideas and plug them into an email signature that is created on Wisestamp. While a basic email signature like the one shown is free, some features can only be used with the premium package.

#2 Add a “what can I do for you?” video clip

If you are sending “cold” emails to prospects, add a video clip to your signature which explains, in a short and concise way, how you can help them. Take care that this clip represents your brand, so it needs to reflect quality and character.

Adding a clip to your signature makes it easy for people to find out what you do and how your product or service could benefit them, without the need for a time consuming face-to-face meeting.

Don’t let the video making idea daunt you…it’s easy to create a pro one with RendrFX (and you can even make your first one for free).

Upload the video to YouTube or Vimeo, and then using a tool like Canva, design the image for email that points to the video.

#3 Promote an event

Using a catchy call to action in your email signature, let recipients know about your event, conference or upcoming sales webinar.

Be sure to point them to a web page where they can find out more, or register.

#4 Advertise blog posts or case studies

Promoting a well written, informative and value-add blog post may be what convinces your prospect that the product or service you provide is credible and trustworthy. Adding a blog post or case study link to your email signature can be a powerful way to showcase your expertise.

#5 Add a link to customer reviews

Research shows that your prospects will trust what your customers say about your brand before they’ll trust what you say about it.

In fact, according to Vendasta, 68% consumers report that positive customer reviews make them trust a business more, and star ratings is the primary method by which people judge your business, so it’s a very powerful tool you can use to build brand credibility.

Granted, it’s not all that easy to incorporate reviews into your business when you don’t know how, so using a tool like Yotpo can be of great help. Yotpo helps you collect genuine customer reviews and works to get more of them. This tool gives multiple benefits, because not only does it collect reviews for you, but also drives more traffic to your site and boosts sales, as a result of incorporating reviews. Simply add a link to your email signature, that leads clicks to your reviews.

#6 Promote sales

If you’re having a sale, notify the people you email by simply including a link. People associate sales with red, so including a bit of red somewhere is a great idea, so that the eye is drawn to the notification, as the “sale” part shows in this example:

#7 Mini website-in-email

A website is like your business’ brick and mortar building: it’s a way for people to get a feel for the brand, and find out information about the business.

In this example email signature, Rex Weston provides a mini-website right from his signature, which includes all his details, as well as a virtual business card and a link to a PDF brochure. At the bottom, it also let’s recipients know of an event the company will be at, and where to find their booth.

All this arranged in a very smart, clean look.

If you really want to go to town, within minutes you can create a one page mini introduction website with WiseIntro, and link to it from your email signature.

This tool is especially helpful for personal branding and for getting more leads, as it includes a signup form on a webpage that is not filled with distracting elements as a website usually is. The result is that you’re likely to get more sign-ups than you might from a website.

Adding the page link into your email signature encourages recipients to find out more about you, and take the action you want them to take.

Summary

Email is the preferred method of communication, so marketers should optimize the opportunity by adding a call to action to email signatures.

Seven brainy ways of sneaking in a call to action, is by:

1. Adding an introduction link which leads to a sign-up form on a standalone webpage.
2. Including a link to a video demonstrating your product or service.
3. Promoting an event by inserting a link to a registration page.
4. Advertising your latest blog posts or case studies.
5. Including a link to positive customer reviews and ratings.
6. Promoting e-commerce sales.
7. Adding a mini website-in-email signature by including lots of information about how your business can benefit the recipient.

The post 7 Ways To Use Email Signatures As Sneaky Call to Actions appeared first on SmallBizTechnology.

Increasingly I find myself clicking “unsubscribe” to email newsletters. I don’t want to unsubscribe from them – but so few have an option to “update my preferences”. Constant Contact, Infusionsoft, Mail Chimp all have options to “update preferences”. However, there are some providers, such as Vertical Response, that only have one option for the read “un-subscribe”.

Often times people want to update their email address, but if you only give the option to “unsubscribe” you’re not just annoying them – you’re hurting yourself. Most people will just unsubscribe.

Of course having only one option, “unsubscribe” is not just the only problem, here are a few more things you can do to make your email newsletter a winning success:

1. Have a great subject line
2. Tell a story and have great content
3. Have a simple, but good design
4. Ensure it’s easily readable on smart phones

Now go fix that “unsubscribe” problem.

The post The One Problem Your Email Newsletter Has and How To Solve It. appeared first on SmallBizTechnology.

While many brands all over the world are reaping the benefits of their content marketing efforts, just as many are puzzled as to why it’s not working for them.

If you aren’t getting the results you want, there are 6 common reasons why your content marketing isn’t working. We’re going to look at each cause and solutions for how to fix them.

1. You’re Doing Content Marketing with No Goal

Most brands take on content marketing because they believe it will help their business, but sometimes, that’s as far as their strategy goes; they pump out blog posts and cross their fingers and see what happens. They don’t have more specific goals for their content marketing strategy, which is ultimately why it fails.

You need to ask yourself what you specifically want to achieve with your blog posts. Do you want to increase your sales, or get more leads? Showcase your industry expertise? Boost SEO rankings?

Caption: Trunkclub’s blog provides visitors with fashion advice, like how to pick out a pair of boots. In order to see their collection and full recommended outfit, users need to create an account and login, driving conversions and sign-ups. 

You need to know what you want your content marketing strategy as a whole to accomplish, and then optimize each post for the specific goal you want it to accomplish; you can’t just go on autopilot and hope for the best.

To address this problem, you need to take a look at what you want your content marketing to achieve and come up with ways to optimize for those results. Doing thorough keyword research, using alt tags in images, and specifying meta descriptions can help you increase the changes of your content being indexed, for example. Placing clickable CTAs throughout your site to learn more about a product or sign up for your newsletter can drive sales and leads, and providing consistent, high quality content educating your readers can build your credibility.

2. You’re Content is Stagnant

If we find something that works once in our content marketing, it’s easy to want to stick to that, whether that’s a style of post or a certain subject. While this might work for a little while, but long term, users are going to get tired if they don’t feel like each post is offering them something fresh and new. Whether you’re only posting too-similar listicles or going over the same topic with little variation, you might lose viewers in favor of competitors that are more diverse.

While it’s important to figure out what works well for your audience, you still want them to feel like they need to read each post for fear that they’ll miss something if they don’t. Some strategies to prevent stagnation in your content marketing include:

• Featuring high quality guest posts from other industry experts
• Add infographics or videos
• Place interactive features (like polls or quizzes) in your content
• Share a mix of case studies, how-to information, and breaking industry news
• Check what’s trending now; Clearvoice has a great database of trending articles if you’re stuck and can connect you with high quality freelancer

Keep an eye on what’s working for you, and check in to your analytics frequently, as it can change before you know it.\

3. You Aren’t Tracking Results

Some businesses will run entire content marketing strategies without ever thoroughly tracking any of their results. Monitoring analytics of your content can tell you what’s working and what isn’t, and it can often give you a lot of insight into how to product better content over time.

Some important metrics to track include:

• Conversion rates, including leads or sales
• Bounce rate
• Engagement rates
• Page views

Tracking the activity on your website is important, but it’s also just as important to see how your content marketing is affecting your social media and email marketing campaigns. They’re all intricately linked together, so looking at the big picture is important, too.

There are a ton of great tools available to help you track all of this information about your content marketing; Google Analytics is a great go-to tool for all businesses, and will even show you where your best traffic is coming from and how they move through your site. Other tools let you create dashboards that pull analytic information from multiple sources, including Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and ecommerce tools like Shopify.

4. Your Content is the Same as Everyone Else’s

There are tons of posts being put out every day; in this current climate of content overload, the question becomes how do you stand out? With a million posts about Facebook Ads or how to choose a wedding cake or best interview questions to ask, how is yours going to be different?

Ultimately, you need to decide how you’re going to be different, and what you can uniquely offer readers that no one else can. Even if it’s just your writing style and your voice that’s unique, something has to be special.

There are a few ways you can write unique posts and lead magnets. One way to do this is to comb the internet and message boards for unanswered questions; if one question keeps getting asked over and over again, there’s clearly an audience and a demand for content that addresses it. Another great method of creating new posts is to take a broader idea, like “Ten Classic Wedding Menus” and focusing in on one niche idea that fits within it, like “Six Wedding Menus to Keep Your Gluten Free/Vegan/Paleo Friends Happy.” 

Sometimes, creating content that’s different from everything else will rely on a combination of research and understanding (and fully embracing) your specific niche.

5. It’s Not Actionable

This is one of the biggest problems most content has; it’s so heavily theoretical, or there’s so much information overload, that users walk away from content thinking “well I still don’t know how to do any of that.” It’s like the manager that keeps telling salespeople “just sell more! Try harder!” As anyone who has ever worked in sales knows, this doesn’t actually ever help anything.

If you take a close look at a lot of how-to posts (or even content in general), they’ll talk about a problem or an idea but won’t show you to actually execute it. It therefore is rarely actually useful, and still leaves your readers wanting.

Your content should offer specific actionable content that users can make use of. This post, for example, is actionable by offering solutions to the problems that prevent success with content marketing. It’s the difference between the manager saying “you need to sell more” and saying “By showing the complementary product and showing them as a set, you’ll have bigger sales.”

Actionable content is valuable content, and that’s what will drive results.

6. It Feels like a Sales Pitch

While you can feature your products and place information and snippets of content to drive conversions, your content should not read like one long 1,000 word sales pitch. It doesn’t feel genuine, and in the age where “authentic content” is king, you’ll lose readers quickly.

We’ve all seen content that is so clearly created only to promote a product or an affiliate link, and the result is that readers are automatically less likely to trust it (and you).

Trademark Universal Stone’s blog post about whether granite is worth the return on investment is a great example of how to promote your products (theirs is granite) without making it read like a sales pitch.

If you’re going to promote a product or place affiliate links, it should almost never be the center of a blog post or lead magnet. Content marketing is about building a relationship with your customers, and if it reads like an advertisement, it won’t be effective.

Instead, subtle mentions of a product and a link and/or CTA to learn more are all that’s needed. You can also place a call to action at the very end of the post, encouraging users to contact you to learn how you can help them more.

Final Thoughts

Content marketing can work, and if you’re putting regular, consistent effort into it, it should be working. Even if your content worked for you in the past, maintaining an effort towards adaptability will keep you up to date on best industry, marketing, and SEO practices, keeping you moving in the right direction and giving you better results long term.

The post 6 Reasons Why Your Content Marketing Sucks appeared first on SmallBizTechnology.

I’ve asked Jacob Hansen, Deliverability Consultant, at SendGrid to help us better understand DMARC.

What exactly is DMARC?

DMARC is an email protocol that uses SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) to determine the authenticity of an email, or prove that an email is coming from where it claims to be coming from. DMARC was created to prevent phishing, but in turn, due to the complexity of some of its details, it has made it that much more difficult for email marketers to reach the inboxes of their target customers if not implemented correctly.

While many email providers currently have DMARC policies in place, Microsoft and Gmail are expected to update their policies sometime this year, which will directly affect how marketers send email. Under the new policies, no one other than Gmail will be able to send email from an @gmail.com email address, and no one other than Microsoft will be able to send email from @outlook.com, @hotmail.com, @live.com and @msn.com email addresses. Yahoo already has a similar policy in place, and therefore only Yahoo can send email from a @yahoo.com email address.

What does this mean for email marketers?

This means that email marketers can not use Gmail or Microsoft email addresses to send email through an email provider. All email must be sent from an owned domain. In most cases, brands own their own domains, however for smaller brands and companies, if email is sent through a Gmail or Microsoft domain, it will no longer be delivered even if it is wanted mail. Without complying with this update, marketers may see their deliverability rates drop.

Complying with DMARC standards will help marketers control their sending reputations, increase visibility into their programs while keeping mail relevant, and establish consistent policies for dealing with unauthenticated mail.

• Protect your brand. Publishing a DMARC record protects your brand by preventing unauthenticated parties from sending mail from your domain. In some cases, simply setting up a DMARC record can result in a positive reputation bump.
• Increase visibility into your email program. Reviewing and consuming DMARC reports increases visibility into your email program by letting you know who is sending mail from your domain. You’re able to get a better look into who is trying to act like you.
• Establish a consistent policy for unauthenticated mail. DMARC helps the email community establish a consistent policy for dealing with messages that fail to authenticate. This helps the marketing email ecosystem as a whole become more secure and more trustworthy.

The takeaway

There is no confirmed date for when Gmail and Microsoft will be updating their policies, they have only specified within this year. But it is a best practice to comply with DMARC regardless if you don’t already. Businesses sending email from a Gmail or Microsoft domain will need to take immediate action to begin sending from an owned domain to ensure the deliverability of their email and success of their email programs. By adhering to DMARC protocols, all brands are setting the standard for authentic email and helping customers receive the mail they want most.

The post New Email Authentication Rules Will Impact Your Email Delivery: Understanding DMARC appeared first on SmallBizTechnology.

I’ve told you before and I’ll tell you again, if you want to succeed in digital marketing ONE of the things you MUST do is to build your email list. Collect email addresses at every opportunity – especially on your web site. Facebook is changing its algorithm to ensure it gives TOP news feed posts to friends and family.

You’ll have to purposefully use the drop down menu of the like button to tell Facebook you want to hear more from your favorite brands, if you want to hear from them.

The NY Times writes – Adam Mosseri, the Facebook manager in charge of the news feed, said in a recent interview that informing and entertaining users was also part of the company’s mission. But he made clear that news and entertainment were secondary pursuits.

“We think more, spend more time and work on more projects that try to help people express themselves with their friends or learn about their friends or have conversations with their friends,” he said.

So yes, use social media, post engaging content and be organic. YES – purchase advertising on social networks to buy more visibility to your content. But it’s important to ALSO build your email list so no matter what algorithms are changes on social networks, you still have a direct way to reach your customers, prospects or fan base – via email or text or even traditional mail!

While social media marketing is powerful – email marketing can be just as powerful or even more powerful.

The post Facebook Changes Algorithms (Again) To Focus on Friends and Family: Build Your Email List. appeared first on SmallBizTechnology.

The survey involved gathering opinions from more than 1,000 small business owners from across the United States. The ten-question survey asked about small business marketing in 2016, including goals, priorities, challenges and tactics.

Results show just how tough small business marketing is. Some of the interesting findings include:

• Nearly 47 percent of small business owners handle marketing on their own. That’s a big duty for someone who already wears so many hats.
• Nearly one in five small business owners don’t plan on using digital marketing in 2016. Digital marketing includes things such as websites, social media, digital advertising and email marketing – techniques that are popular among larger businesses but harder for some small businesses to manage.
• Over 20 percent of small business owners don’t store customer and lead information at all and only 24 percent use a customer relationship management (CRM) tool.
• Small business owners are challenged with measuring the results of their marketing campaigns. Almost half aren’t sure if their efforts are effective, and 13.9 percent know for sure that they aren’t.

Despite these statistics, small business owners are well aware of the potential benefits of a good marketing strategy. About half will be using digital marketing in 2016 to drive sales and brand awareness, and about one in three will focus on goals such as collecting leads and retaining customers. There are many one of the top agencies in legal firm marketing that specialize in working.

The survey clearly shows how difficult small business marketing is. One potential reason is demonstrated in the following finding: “Most small businesses are still using a fairly unsophisticated digital marketing stack.” Fourty-one percent use only one or two software applications, and another 26 percent use three or four.

However, there are plenty of tech tools available for small business marketing, including tools to help manage customers and leads, tools to help measure marketing results, and tools that make specific strategies (like blogs, social media, and emails) easier to implement. Small business marketing is definitely one of the biggest challenges your company will face – it’s time to embrace the technology that will make it simpler and more effective.

The post Overwhelmed by Marketing? New Survey Shows Just How Tough Small Business Marketing Is appeared first on SmallBizTechnology.